Slopfree Software Index

A list of software that has taken steps to reject AI in its development processes.

There's been a lot of news about prominent open-source projects increasingly using LLMs. But this only shows one side of the story - we don't see all the software that rejects AI contributions and continues to be human-made.

This is not an exhaustive list! If you see a project that fits the criteria below, please raise an issue or a PR!

The List

Databases

Development

Gaming

Graphics

Hardware

Glasgow Interface Explorer - https://glasgow-embedded.org/latest/contribute.html#contributing-code-or-documentation

Health

Migraine Log - https://gitlab.com/mglog/org.zerodogg.migraineLog/-/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md?ref_type=heads#use-of-generative-ai

Internet

Languages

Clojure - https://clojure.org/dev/contributor_agreement#_no_generated_code
Fennel - https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel/tree/main/item/CONTRIBUTING.md#contribution-transparency
Idris - https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris2/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#things-we-will-not-accept (Has the Claude banner due to a single Claude commit that occurred before this policy took effect. After that commit was made, the project changed their contributing guidelines to block LLM code.)
Zig - https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy

Libraries

Multimedia

Amberol - https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/amberol/-/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#use-of-generative-ai (Use of AI to "answer questions and find information" permitted but strongly discouraged in favour of "existing documentation" and "chats and forums")
Schism Tracker - https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker/blob/master/AGENTS.md
Tenacity - https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#the-use-of-llms-and-ai-in-contributions

Office

Operating Systems

Organizations

Creative Commons - https://opensource.creativecommons.org/contributing-code/ (Creative Commons bans AI generated submissions to all their current open source projects. See the list of active projects.)
SciActive Inc - https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/ (List of their open source projects.)

Programming

Mikan - https://codeberg.org/1lab/mikan/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
OpenJDK - https://openjdk.org/legal/ai (Use of generative AI tools are not allowed when submitting content to the project. The project allows the private use of generative AI tools for research and debugging, but do not allow content generated by these tools into the project. The current policy is an interim policy and may change over time. In particular, OpenJDK is sponsored by Oracle, which stands to financially benefit from generative AI.)
SDL - https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/AGENTS.md (Discussion about LLM contributions: Issue)

Scientific

Elastic - https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/elastic#use-of-generative-ai

Uncategorized

Utilities

Alacritty - https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
Bobby - https://github.com/hbons/Bobby?tab=contributing-ov-file
Borgmatic - https://projects.torsion.org/borgmatic-collective/borgmatic/src/branch/main/AGENTS.md (An AGENTS.md file is provided, which instructs the agent to not modify the code. AI is allowed to interact with the code in a read-only manner.)
chezmoi - https://www.chezmoi.io/developer-guide/ (Shows a Claude banner due to a single Claude commit that was created before the introduction of the ban.)
ChiPass - https://codeberg.org/ChiPass/ChiPass/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
Evi - https://mastodon.social/@mrmasterkeyboard/116192873098653079
gaypanel - https://codeberg.org/pastthepixels/gaypanel/src/branch/main/README.md#i-wanna-contribute
gedit - https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/gedit/gedit/-/blob/master/docs/guidelines/no-llm-tools.md
Gram - https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram/commit/d16ca9981d (Fork of the Zed editor, which has AI-generated code. However, this is explicitly a fork seeking to remove AI which is very much in the spirit of being slopfree. The amount of AI-generated legacy code may decrease over time.)
Linux Man Pages - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING.d/ai (Note that this only applies to the man-pages project: the core Linux project allows AI and has received several AI-assisted contributions.)
MirBSD - https://mbsd.evolvis.org/permalinks/wlog2021_e20240726.htm#e20240726_wlog2021
Smederee - https://smeder.ee/~jan0sch/smederee/files/CONTRIBUTING.md (Point in section "Patch Requirements": "A patch SHALL NOT include any contributions which are believed to include or derive from AI generated content.")
Teamtype - https://github.com/teamtype/teamtype/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#generative-aillm-policy
Unison - https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#llm-usage
Vim Classic - https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.html
XScreenSaver - https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#writing-savers

Virtualisation

EmulatorKit - https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/EmulatorKit/src/branch/master/ContributionRules (Explicit ban on Copilot; maintainer has confirmed this applies to other LLM contributions)
QEMU - https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/code-provenance.html#use-of-ai-generated-content

Retractions

Godot Engine - includes AI-driven code changes (Example 1 Example 2)
Virtualbox - they have now added an AGENTS.md file

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Tips

Tips would be greatly appreciated; each tip will encourage me to continue building awesome software and help with living expenses! At the time of writing (2026-05-18), all tips go to the project maintainer brib.

Credits

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331#issuecomment-4015299291
https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware
Thanks to the Slopscore project for their tool that surfaces AI-generated commits from repositories.
Special thanks to everyone who replied to my original Mastodon toot
Special thanks to witch_t *navi and everyone who replied with their own suggestions.
Special thanks to Edward Loveall for his work on the automatic build system.
Special thanks to Mathias Panzenböck for finding a large number of accepted projects.

Other Lists of Slopfree Software

https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

Why care about slopfree software?

Software Reliability and Stability

AI is notorious for its ability to create subtle bugs and security issues that are hard to detect. In AWS, this even directly led to an outage.

The project maintainer brib has noticed that LLMs incentivise coders to think less critically about the resulting code. This has the potential to negatively impact the quality of the codebase and the psychological wellbeing of developers.

By choosing human software, you can be assured that the maintainers have a good understanding of the codebase and are able to reason about and fix any potential issues. This helps ensure the long-term reliability and stability of the software you are using.

Psychological Integrity

There is evidence to indicate that AI use harms reasoning ability and skill formation. For example:

Brains show less activity when completing tasks with LLMs compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
Developers who use early-2025 LLMs reported higher subjective performance, but were measured to have lower objective performance. This gap between subjective and objective performance was considered notable.
In an Anthropic study, learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
There have been reports of "AI psychosis", where mental health rapidly degrades in connection with using AI. This can occur in people without pre-existing psychotic symptoms.
A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
In May 2026, 404 Media published an article detailing software developers' experiences with using LLMs. The developers covered in the article were worried about losing important skills to LLMs.
There is a study showing that doctors who use AI to help detect cancer become less skilled at detecting cancer without AI.
A study involving over 1,000 participants indicates that after only 10 minutes of interaction with an LLM, people show an increased dependence on LLMs and are more likely to give up without them. The study also shows that LLM use has a causal effect on this outcome.

By supporting human-made software, you can help developers maintain their skills and reasoning abilities.

Harm Reduction

By choosing human software, you can be assured that the developers are not funding machines that are fuelling the climate crisis and an unjustified war in the Middle East.

Copyright

By choosing human software, you can be assured that your business will not be adversely affected by copyright lawsuits that may affect the legality of the software you are using or your ability to protect your own intellectual property.

Effectiveness of Having a No-AI Policy

Every time a project considers adding a no-AI policy, someone invariably asks "Why bother making such a policy when AI-users can just lie?"

Almost all open source projects have rules that are impossible to enforce perfectly. For example, most open source projects have policies prohibiting illegal content. But most maintainers are not Supreme Court Justices, so they do not know for certain whether a piece of code is illegal. The best maintainers can do is try to enforce their policies as best they can with limited information, and with the understanding mistakes will sometimes happen.

It will likely always be possible for someone to carefully edit LLM-generated code to remove any traces of its origins, but that would take a lot of work. People who use LLMs typically aren't interested in doing a lot of work.

Finally, it is worth noting that the vast majority of people who contribute to open source projects do so in good faith. Most FOSS contributors are very passionate about the projects they work on, and they devote their free time to making free software better because they want to.

Hence, if a project has a clearly stated policy against LLM-generated contributions, most potential contributors will respect the policy.

Keep software slopfree!

There is currently a significant maintainability crisis in open-source software. In many cases, the adoption of LLMs is a response to this maintainability crisis. Please do not attack maintainers simply for using LLMs.

You can do your part to keep software slopfree!

Be nice to the maintainers! They need your moral support.
Donate to slopfree projects if you have the financial resources.
Contribute with your time and skills, if you are able to. Contributing doesn't have to be code, and contributing quality translations and documentation can also help the project.

License

This project is a combination of documentation and code and is therefore covered by two licenses.

All code is covered by GNU-GPL-3.0.

All documentation is covered by CC-BY-SA.

For clarification, individual files are labelled with the appropriate SPDX-License-Identifier in the comments.